The evolution of computer networking technologies in the workplace, and the world-over (e.g., the Internet), has provided substantial increase in productivity. In particular, many tasks have become automated, and various valuable services are provided to promote increased communication, workflow, and effectiveness of many businesses and personal applications. Networking technologies provide sharing functionality whereby users or applications can share logical partitions of data with other users and applications. For example, a user can share a folder with one or more other users by allowing the users to directly access the folder, subject to some authorization rules, via the network. This functionality is provided by implementing applications or services that leverage directory services, which define and manage identity aspects of various user accounts and network resources, for example. Lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) is an example of a directory services implementation that operates over a network protocol such as transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP). LDAP can be distributed across multiple network devices to provide replicated services for efficiency and accessibility; the LDAP service devices can be synchronized through updating procedures defined by the LDAP implementation.
In more recent technology, distributed file systems (DFS) have been implemented to provide access to multiple network resources in a single seamless link, called a DFS link; such access is typically provided for given namespaces. A DFS root target server hosts one or more namespaces having multiple DFS links; the DFS root target servers collect and manage DFS link data for subsequent access. Directory services implementations (e.g., LDAP) have been utilized to provide this functionality by allowing DFS root nodes to store the link data related to a namespace in a specific directory object related to the namespace. In this implementation, attributes of the namespace directory object relate to the various shares of the namespace. When operating with multiple directory services implementations, or when updating cache to a DFS root target server, updates to a single DFS link requires that the directory object related to the entire namespace be transferred among the DFS root target servers and stored to provide up-to-date link information for the entire namespace.